As the Sea Swallows, the Islanders Hang On

By RICK BRAGG

Published: June 30, 2002

ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, La., June 25—
Paul Terry Dardar's mobile home perches on stilts eight feet high. He has never trusted land.

''I was raised in the water, and my daddy was raised in the water, and my granddaddy -- well, I don't know if I had a granddaddy, but he was probably raised in the water,'' said Mr. Dardar, a fisherman and one of about 230 people who live on this tiny island amid the marshes and bays of southern Louisiana.

''My daddy died in his boat,'' he said. ''Died happy. The water's not done me no harm. Catch a fish, catch a crab. Done me good.''

The water, he said, is a permanent thing.

It is the land that is temporary.

''Ain't much of it left,'' he said.

Isle de Jean Charles is being swallowed by the water that surrounds it. A ridge of dry ground that rises just a few feet above the brackish water of Terrebonne Parish, it is slowly sinking -- along with the rest of coastal Louisiana -- into the Gulf of Mexico. The people who live here, most of them poor, have watched it shrink year by year, seeing gardens, baseball sandlots and backyards vanish and shade trees wither into gray stumps from the infusion of saltwater.

About all that is left is a single street lined with small houses and mobile homes, and people who measure the land not in lots or acres, but feet and inches.

The residents, Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians whose ancestors first bought land here in 1876, say the land seems to dwindle on every receding tide, and is only about a fourth the size it was when its oldest residents were children.

''We're washing away,'' said Pierre Naquin, a retired tugboat captain whose family has lived on the island for 126 years.

Like the other people here, his accent is Cajun, more music than language, and as he talks about life here it sounds like a sad, sweet song.

The island is just a speck on a coastline that has had its protective marshes eaten away by encroaching saltwater, a result of levees, canals and other coastal constructions that altered the natural flow of water that trickles south from the Mississippi.

Unable to rebuild itself naturally with silt from that great river, much of the coastline is sinking, and the denuded marshes, a natural buffer to hurricanes, have left the state more vulnerable than ever to a catastrophic storm.

But few places in Louisiana are so at risk as the Isle de Jean Charles. Federal officials, who are planning a huge hurricane levee to protect several towns here, will not even try to save this island.

The proposed hurricane levee, which would stand as high as 14 feet and stretch more than 70 miles through Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes, would be built to the north of the Isle de Jean Charles, leaving it unprotected.

''They're just going to let it get us,'' said Mr. Naquin, 61.

A report by the Army Corps of Engineers said that the levee would cost about $680 million and could be completed no sooner than 2020. Carolyn Earle, a senior project manager with the corps, said extending that levee to include the Isle de Jean Charles would cost $100 million more.

''We were unable to economically justify including Isle de Jean Charles in that plan,'' Ms. Earle said.

Instead, the report suggests relocating the people of the island -- at a cost of $8 million -- to someplace behind that proposed levee. But in a meeting of the Army corps and residents this month, most people said they would rather live ankle-deep in muck than abandon a place they have lived for generations.

''We can't force anybody to relocate,'' Ms. Earle said.

To an outsider, it might not seem much worth saving. Of the some 60 houses that cluster around the single road, many are water-damaged and some are abandoned, their doors left open, windows broken. An engine block rusts in a ditch, a fishing boat sails in the weeds. In one yard, now covered with water, a tire swing hangs from a dying tree. Only the wind pushes it now.

Children walk up the only street, walk down it, then repeat the process. There is little else for them to do, say the people here. The population has gradually gotten older, tribal elders say. There is little reason for young people to stay on an island where the future, like the ground, is so limited.

Once, small fields of bean, squash, corn and tomatoes -- even small pastures for dairy cows -- lay behind the houses, said Mr. Naquin. Now, what little spare ground is left is laced with salt, unfit to plant.

Construction of several pipelines around the island and the cutting of nearby canals to service oil and gas vessels have broken up the surrounding marsh and accelerated the erosion. The island is down to one road about two miles long, and less than 100 usable acres.

But perhaps the weakest link to the island's future is the road that connects it to the outside world. The road, really a thin causeway, vanishes underwater in storms. At high tide, water laps at the edge of the asphalt, making it seem as if the road is paved on the water itself.

Once, it ran across marsh and even dry ground. Now, the gulf has rushed in to bury the land, and has all but claimed the road itself.

Why would anyone insist on staying, in such a tenuous place?

''I get to hear the wind blow,'' said Chris Brunet, who serves on the community council.